LETTER: Bersted bottom of pile again

We were astounded to learn recently of the new local plan Arun District Council in all its wisdom is trying to put in place namely 2,500 houses along and around Chalcraft Lane.

Once again Bersted is bottom of the pile when it comes to consideration of its residents. The new Felpham relief road is a great relief to Felpham and a great purgatory for Bersted, the traffic is now at a standstill many times during the day and adding thousands of new houses will make an unbearable situation absolutely intolerable.

There is no infrastructure in place or proposed to cope with all the extra people this amount of extra development will bring. The land scheduled to be built on is prime agricultural land that will be sorely needed post Brexit to feed us all, it is also subject to flooding and concreting it over will only transfer the problem elsewhere.

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The water table in this area is very high and graves in the Chalcraft cemetery are water logged during wet weather as it is. Why is it that the brownfield site at Ford is no longer deemed suitable for development on the scale of what is proposed for Bersted and Pagham?

Does the impending sale of Bognor Golf Club to developers come into the equation of the local plan or is this getting a bit close to where a lot of councillors and planners live? An email to Nick Gibb MP resulted in a letter from him informing us he is ‘aware’ of the situation and rather patronisingly suggests we get in touch with ADC as though we hadn’t given that idea a thought.

What has happened to the strategic gap between Bognor and Chichester that a few years ago was considered very important or is ADC now happy to see the town of Bogchester come into being?

The whole procedure has been questionable not to mention comical from the start. There has very little publicity about this plan but that was probably intentional. Trying to fill in the online forms for objections to MMs is only for the legally qualified, once again probably intentional, nothing on the site is user friendly and again probably intentional.

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It begs the question, exactly how many millions of pounds does ADC stand to make from the developers of this sad and stupid project and will they be spending any of these extra millions in Bersted or Pagham?

Probably they would prefer to spend it where they normally do ie the other side of the river in areas much more important to them, or perhaps it could be used to increase councillors’ rewards and expenses for doing such a magnificent job for the communities of Bersted and Pagham

The whole plan is ill thought out, unsustainable and against all logic and basically dumps another load of rubbish on the existing residents of Bersted and Pagham and is not fit for purpose.

David & Sue Weller

Chalcraft Lane, Bersted